Icy Box running 12 hours a day?

[Pete]

Hi

I'm thinking of using my Icy Box external USB drive, that has Maxtor
Diamondmax Plus 8 40Gb drive with an Linksys NSLU2, this means it will
be running 12-14 hours a day. I have noticed that the Icy Box gets
quiet warm/almost 'hot' when on for a few hours.

Can anyone say whether these enclosures are designed to keep the drives
at a reasonable temp if run for this amount of time?

I also read a user review, that said that after the disk has been
formatted to the ext3 format, it cannot be re-used with windows, ever.
Is that the case? Can the drive not be re-formatted to NTFS if at some
later stage I up grade?

Thanks
Pete

 

[Arno Wagner]

Hi

I'm thinking of using my Icy Box external USB drive, that has Maxtor
Diamondmax Plus 8 40Gb drive with an Linksys NSLU2, this means it will
be running 12-14 hours a day. I have noticed that the Icy Box gets
quiet warm/almost 'hot' when on for a few hours.

Can anyone say whether these enclosures are designed to keep the drives
at a reasonable temp if run for this amount of time?

If they get 'hot' then that is too much for the drive. Especially for
Maxtros that have a history of dying young when running hot.

I also read a user review, that said that after the disk has been
formatted to the ext3 format, it cannot be re-used with windows, ever.
Is that the case? Can the drive not be re-formatted to NTFS if at some
later stage I up grade?

Thst is complete nonsense. You can allways blank the drive
(e.g. "cat /dev/zero > /dev/<target>" or "dd_rescue /dev/zero
/dev/<target>" with nice progess indicator) and return it to
the state it was in when new. Use a partition for <target>
to just erase one partition. There might be a problem doing it
directly with Windows, most likely some designed-in problem
MS did to make people stay away from Linux, but apart from that
there is nothing that can lock a partition to a particular fomat.

Arno